Companies don’t need to wait for 5G to get 5G-like services

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5G mobile service has long been hyped as enabling new enterprise services. But similar offerings can be delivered using existing technology.

For years, mobile technology developers have promised that 5G would tap new opportunities in enterprise services: unmanned construction vehicles, warehouse robots, remote surgery, smart agriculture, to name a few.

Operators saw that LTE’s faster speeds didn’t do enough to alter one of their biggest and oldest problems: revenue growth curves that didn’t pair well with infrastructure cost curves.

5G equipment vendors had to promise a remedy: new revenue from enterprises served (as much as possible) by the same infrastructure delivering consumer mobile broadband.

There’s one problem with this promise: 5G is still pretty far away.

Even the recently accelerated timetable approved by the 3GPP (an industry standards body guiding 5G), which could enable large-scale trials and deployments as early as 2019, might seem too long to wait if you’re a global networking vendor that’s been reporting disappointing financials for years.

In promoting this offering, Huawei used a tactic it had already applied effectively to mobile broadband: hailing the powers of what Huawei calls 4.5G to uniquely deliver these services.

With new features surpassing 4G but available now (unlike 5G), 4.5G is Huawei’s way of harnessing interest in 5G use cases and directing it toward gear that can be purchased today.

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There are other ways to make this argument.

Beyond the enhancements to LTE that constitute 4.5G or LTE-Advanced Pro, vendors and operators have at their disposal several emerging technologies aimed at aiding new approaches to the enterprise that offer 5G-like capabilities such as higher speeds.